This is for the dirtbags
Two new poems by Michael Robbins
The new year comes freighted with expectations for self-assertion and self-improvement. Start your year off instead by spending some time with two paeans to surrender and abasement by the poet and critic Michael Robbins. The newest entries in Robbins’s “Domme Song” series, published in Issue Sixteen, consider the plotting of Eros from Aphrodite to Budweiser. Read them below, and don’t forget to save the date for our issue launch party next Wednesday evening at the White Horse Tavern in the Financial District starting at 7 p.m. We hope to see you there!
MICHAEL ROBBINS
Aphrodite’s like sigh what now
Sappho, what’s your crazy heart
want now? Aphrodite I am seventeen
again, I am singing along with the Cure,
I’m a bald girl with a big gut in a bad wig.
Aphrodite says There are things you’re
better off not knowing. Like what says
Sappho, brighter and wider than snow.
The goddess says Against the lucky
Eros plots. And Sappho goes
But starships were meant to fly
and the horse meadow is in bloom.
And the goddess says Careful girl
I was born when the harvest castrated
the sky. But Sappho’s staring at the sea.
Big summer rips through long night.
Pan is fucking a goat on the beach.
MICHAEL ROBBINS
This is for every boy
who ever picked me
last for basketball. I’m lying
flat as a fish on the floor
of the fast train
your apartment becomes
when you press your foot
into my face.
This is for every therapist
who ever asked me
if I’d made a plan. My plan
was to not get locked up
by answering that question.
I’m practicing mindfulness
outside Sonic
in a pink skirt and skates.
This is for A.A. and every other
church I ditched
for my people, the dirtbags.
This is for the dirtbags,
my people. This is for every winter
I hated and every summer
I wasted. I’m the glitter
rubbing off. I’m one thin dime.
This is for my enlarged prostate.
This is for the boy you fucked
with the stupid tattoo. I’m a motion-
activated singing fish on the wall.
You’re a Budweiser lampshade
above a pool table, color-coding
hard men bent across the felt. I flap
my thick wet fish lips and you go dark.